The Revolution
1843-1848. AETAT 37-43
Politics in Italy--The Bandieras--The Post-Office
scandal--The People's International League--Life in
1845-47--Letter to Pio Nono--Attitude towards the
royalists--The Revolution of 1848--At Milan.
While Mazzini was watching from England in discouragement, and the
waves seemed to gain no painful inch, in Italy the main came flooding
in. How far exactly the sudden tide of national impulse owed itself to
his teaching, is perhaps an insoluble problem. But when one remembers
how wide had been the influence of Young Italy, how many of the men
who were now coming to the front had been its members, it seems
unlikely that the impetus could have come without him. Young
University men who treasured secretly at home his pamphlets or numbers
of the _Apostolato Popolare_, artisans who had fingermarked his or
Gustavo Modena's tracts, were pondering his teaching and waiting for
the times to ripen. But Mazzini's influence, even if the most
powerful, was not the only one. Traditions still lived on, handed down
from the Carbonaro revolutions; the old belief in Charles Albert was
flickering into life again; the mild Catholic nationalism, that came
from Manzoni and his school, flowed strong; and all the time the daily
witness of oppression and misrule was there to preach against the
Austrians and the native tyrants. And though there were many currents
in the swelling crowd of nationalists, at two points all moved
together. Austria must go, and there must be some guarantee for good
government.
In spite of censors and police, the rising spirit showed itself in
literature. "The shade of Dante, the poet of the regenerated nation,
began to brood above the speech and silence of the land." Students, in
the footsteps of Foscolo and Gabriel Rossetti, drew all the reading
world of Italy to the great national seer, who more than five
centuries before had pleaded for unity. Dramatists and historians and
novel-writers spoke of the ancient glories of their country. Social
reformers came in to swell the liberal movement, founders of schools
and savings banks, agricultural pioneers, builders of railways that
would "stitch the boot." Their interest in politics was a secondary
one, and such political sympathies as they had, were generally with
the Moderate politicians, just rising to a prominence, which was soon
to eclipse Mazzini's waning light. Gioberti had already published his
_Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians_, which, while it echoed
Mazzini's faith in Italy and Rome, banned democracy and unity,
preached federalism and half-hearted liberalism, and looked for
salvation to Charles Albert and a reforming Pope. Cesare Balbo in
Piedmont was pleading for the same mild policy, without its faith in
the Papacy. Theirs was an easy creed beside Mazzini's. They had little
of his religious faith, none of his passionate democracy, his demand
for sacrifice and martyrdom. It was a creed for the doubting and
half-hearted, for the royalist and Catholic, for the courtier and the
rich man and the priest; and also for the level-headed man of the
world, who turned from Mazzini's fancies and idealism, who laughed at
Italy's mission to humanity but cherished a more modest hope for her
own regeneration. But at all events the teaching had two notes in
common with his own. It strove to lift the nation to healthy ambition
and strenuous effort; it cried as earnestly as he did for the
expulsion of the Austrian. And so it made the complement of his work.
Less noble in its spirit, more halting in its patriotism and
uninspiring of great deeds, yet it marshalled for the cause a host,
that would never have swelled the thin ranks of Young Italy. It
supplied the common movement with qualities that Mazzini conspicuously
lacked,--a political sense of the possible, and, among its better
exponents, a patience and tolerance, a comprehensiveness that
prejudged no class and welcomed all, who, gladly or reluctantly,
offered themselves for the great task.
One of the sources of the Moderate movement was the impatience at the
little insurrections, that only led to useless loss of life and an
embittering of the tyranny. One of its postulates laid down that there
should be no revolt against the better native princes, and that the
fight with Austria should be waged by regular armies. But the
traditions of revolt could not die out at once, indeed were all the
stronger for the new spirit of hope that was abroad. All Central Italy
was alive with plots. Mazzini, though he was coming partially to
recognize the futility of these petty risings, still had a standard
of preparation that was pitifully inadequate. He was elaborating a
scheme for a rising in the Papal States, to be followed by movements
in the North and South and supported by the exiles. He was still
persuaded that a few small guerilla bands would draw the people after
them, that daring and a clear programme were the only necessary
conditions of victory. He found few men and less money for his plot.
Among the handful, who put themselves at his disposal, were two young
Venetian nobles, Attilio and Emilio Bandiera, officers in the Austrian
navy, which was chiefly manned by Italians and Dalmatians. They were
high-minded lads, and, one is bound to add, sentimentalists and prigs,
naively self-conscious and immature; but with the supreme virtue that
they were ready to take their lives in their hands. Mazzini wished to
use them for his designs in Central Italy; but there were police
agents of the governments around them, who had their ear and sent them
with a handful of followers, including a man in the pay of the police,
to help an imaginary rising in Calabria. The English government, too,
had opened their correspondence with Mazzini, and put the government
at Naples on its guard. Thus they went, as they foreboded, to their
death. The trap was ready for them; and when they landed near Cosenza,
they were captured easily and shot.
The ignoble action of the English government brought Mazzini into
English political life. He suspected that his correspondence had been
tampered with in the post, and careful experiments proved to him that
his letters had been opened, sealed with new wafers, and the postmark
altered. He put the matter into the hands of Thomas Duncombe, the
member for Finsbury; and the storm of indignation, that followed
Duncombe's disclosures in the House of Commons, showed how angrily the
better English opinion felt it, that the government had violated
elementary ethics and "played the spy" in the interests of continental
tyranny. Shiel and Macaulay denounced it in parliament. Carlyle wrote
to the _Times_ that "it is a question vital to us that sealed letters
in an English post-office be, as we all fancied they were, respected
as things sacred; that opening of men's letters, a practice near of
kin to picking men's pockets, and to other still viler and far fataler
forms of scoundrelism, be not resorted to except in cases of very last
extremity." The government tried to ride out the storm with quibbles
and constructive falsehoods, which proved, as Mazzini said, that they
adopted different standards of honour for their public and their
private lives. Sir James Graham repeated the stale charge that Mazzini
had promoted assassination in France, and honourably withdrew it, when
he knew the facts. But public feeling was too heated to let the matter
rest there; and secret Committees of enquiry were appointed by both
Houses. They reported that letters had been constantly opened at the
Post-Office, at all events since 1806; that even letters of members of
parliament had been tampered with; that in this case the government
had issued a warrant to open Mazzini's letters (his letters had in
fact been opened several months before the date of the warrant), and
had sent information extracted from them to "a Foreign Power." It is
true that this information seems to have been of a general character,
but that did not affect the ignominy of the whole business or the fact
that an English government had sent a warning to the Bourbons, that
helped them to entrap the hapless patriots.
The incident gave Mazzini a welcome opportunity to appeal more
directly to English opinion on behalf of Italy. He had a supreme
contempt for English foreign policy, which "opposes everything that
introduces a new fact in the European polity, and is the first to
recognize it when it shows its strength." It was an unfair criticism,
at least of Canning and Palmerston, tied though the latter's hands
were by court and colleagues. England was still on the whole the
champion of the cause of men. But it was true that the Foreign Office
gave small attention to the great nationalist movements that were
maturing in Europe. The wise policy for England, as he urged, was to
encourage these movements, and win the gratitude of the rising
nationalities, not necessarily by armed intervention (he expressly
disclaimed asking for that), but by her moral backing. Perhaps it was
partly owing to the seeds he sowed at this time, that Palmerston
afterwards did for Italy so much of what he asked for. We may regret
that he never gave a generous recognition to the great Foreign
Secretary's policy.
On individual Englishmen and Americans he knew that he could count for
practical sympathy. He exploited well both the anti-Papal feeling in
the country and the old love of Italian liberty, which had descended
from the days of Byron and Hobhouse. English and American travellers
carried his secret letters and literature into Italy. He had plans
for utilizing the Christian Alliance, an American society for
Protestant propagandism. A year or two later he induced his English
women-friends to organize an Italian bazaar, which was held at Mrs
Milner-Gibson's, nominally for the expenses of his Italian school, but
with the secret intention of devoting any surplus from the Italian
contributions to a National Fund, which he was trying to raise for
political work. In the same year, 1847, he founded a People's
International League to resume the interrupted work of Young Europe,
but mainly with the object of enlisting sympathy for Italy. Stansfeld,
the Ashursts, Peter Taylor, W. Shaen, Thomas Cooper, Henry Vincent the
Chartist, W. J. Fox (the Unitarian orator, afterwards M.P. for
Oldham), served on the Committee. They used to meet once a week at Mr
W. J. Linton's house in Hatton Garden, and Mazzini "with those
wondrous eyes of his lit up with a power that was almost
overwhelming," infected them with his own enthusiasm and faith. Men
among them, like Thomas Cooper and Peter Taylor, who had denounced
physical force remedies in England, demurred at his gospel of
revolution. "You are right about your own country," he passionately
answered. "You have had your grand decisive struggle against tyrannous
power. You need no physical force. But what are my countrymen to do,
who are trodden down under the iron heel of a foreign tyranny? They
have no representation, they have no charters, they have no written
rights. They must fight."
The business of the League brought one of the very few occasions, on
which, so far as is known, he expressed his views on Ireland. Some
Repealers complained to the League that it had omitted Ireland in its
report from the list of the nationalities of the future; and Mazzini
was asked to draft an answer to them. His argument was addressed to
Separatists, but it would apply almost equally to Home Rulers; it
proves how radically he misunderstood the Irish movement, and he seems
to have felt himself on unsafe ground. He regarded the Irish demand as
at bottom one for better government only; and he had every sympathy
with their "just consciousness of human dignity, claiming its long
violated rights," their "wish to have rulers, educators, not masters,"
their protests against "legislation grounded on distrust and
hostility." But he believed that the nationalist movement was not
likely to be permanent, and he refused to see any elements of true
nationality in it, on the grounds that the Irish did not "plead for
any distinct principle of life or system of legislation, derived from
native peculiarities, and contrasting radically with English wants and
wishes," nor claimed for their country any "high special function" to
discharge in the interests of humanity. On which it may be noted that
the first objection shows Mazzini's ill-acquaintance with Irish life
and feeling, and that the second involves a condition, which, save in
his own theories, has not been asked of any nation.
* * * * *
In place of the enforced idleness of a few years before, he was now
only too busy. Political correspondence, literary work, the school,
the bazaar, visiting and being visited crowded on his time. He hardly
left London, except for two visits to France and one perhaps to
Italy, and once for a pilgrimage to Newstead Abbey and other places of
Byronic memory. He had left Chelsea, and moved first to Devonshire
Street, near the British Museum, and afterwards to Cropley Street,
near the New North Road. He was somewhat happier and more hopeful. His
active life left little time for the old broodings. The Post-Office
scandal had brought him new friends, and the desolation of his
solitude had gone. He joined the Whittington Club, largely for the
sake of playing chess, at which he was an adept and did not like being
beaten. He was much perturbed by a proposal to allow no chess on
Sundays, and jokingly threatens a rider that smoking too shall be
forbidden, except to those who undertake to sit silent for an hour in
religious contemplation, and that, as further penance for the members,
one of them shall "read twelve minutes every hour _alta voce e con
declamazione_ a parliamentary speech from Mr Plumpton or Sir Robert
Inglis or a chapter from the second volume of Tancred by D'Israeli."
But when back in his lodgings, he was often depressed and miserable
again. He was "giddy" with writing, worn down with work and want of
proper food and clothes; and for the first time he writes in bad
spirits about his physical condition. The burden of poverty and debt
still "dominated his life." He was now in receipt of a small allowance
from his mother, to find which she stinted herself of every luxury and
more. But he was generous as ever, and probably as bad a housekeeper;
and he found himself powerless to reduce the mountain of debt. His
literary earnings were again very small. The life of Foscolo was still
waiting to be begun, for he thought it better now "to supply new
materials for Italian history than make an inventory of the old." The
better-paying reviews no longer took his articles, and he was "writing
on Switzerland and heaven knows what for a petty Edinburgh magazine."
He fretted because the need of hack-work and his multifarious
occupations left little time for writings that would help the cause,
as they had helped it fifteen years ago. "For the wretched sum of some
8000 francs," he writes, "I am a slave; I am growing old in body, in
soul, in power, and I am not allowed to help my country and fulfil my
mission." And from causes that we can only guess at,--perhaps the
worry and publicity, perhaps the partial lifting of his unhappiness,
perhaps the loss of physical health,--there is a perceptible, though
slight decline from the moral height of a few years before. He is less
the apostle, more the politician, too fond of coming forward as the
practical man--a part that ill became him,--not always straightforward
in his utterances and methods, more reasonable, it is true, and
tolerant, but at the same time sliding into occasional reticences and
equivocation.
The result of the Bandiera episode was to leave Young Italy yet more
friendless than before. Its miserable mismanagement was set down to
Mazzini, unfairly on the whole; and cruel slanders charged him with
egging others to a desperate task, while he stayed safe behind. In
reality, he was more impatient than ever to lead a fight in Italy
"before he grew quite old." But he seems again to have recognized that
any fruitful action was impossible. All his efforts for the National
Fund brought in a poor £100. And he knew that he was losing his hold
on the middle classes, and must wait till he had formed a party among
the working men of the towns. The Rimini revolt of 1845, its poor
programme of local reform and silence on the bigger issues, proved
what influence the Moderate movement in its worst and weakest form had
even in those parts of Italy, from which he had hoped most. A year
later the Moderates leaped into overwhelming prominence with the
accession of Pio Nono to the Papacy. Here was a Pope, the Italians
fondly thought, eager to bless Liberals and Nationalists, while
Charles Albert in the North was threatening to bare his sword for war.
The mass of Italian Liberalism caught at their protection, and was
ready to pay the price. Some no doubt hoped to push on the King, till
he was "moral," if not actual "lord of Italy"; others dreamed that
circumstances might make Pius president of an Italian Republic. But
the majority willingly accepted the limitations of the policy, were
ready to safeguard the Temporal Power, to make Italian union no better
than a loose federation, to stop short at administrative reform or at
the most at middle-class constitutions.
Mazzini was very suspicious of the new development; jealous that the
nationalist movement had passed into other hands, that the credit of
it went to men like Gioberti, who had halted in their faith, while he
alone had held the banner high; sceptical of Charles Albert's and the
Pope's intentions; angry at the tentative, compromising ambitions of
the Moderates, at their repudiation of democracy, their trust in
diplomacy and its pretences and deceptions. He knew Charles Albert's
"rabbit-nature"; he judged Pio Nono much at his own estimate. "They
want," said the Pope, "to make a Napoleon of me, who am only a poor
country parson." "An honest parson but a bad prince," was Mazzini's
verdict. The triumph of the Moderates meant that Unity would be put
indefinitely back, and federalism inflict "perpetual impotence" on
Italy. But he saw the impossibility of standing out against the new
spirit. And he was prepared, as he had been in 1833 and again in 1844,
to waive his republican agitation, if the Moderates for their part
would abandon federalism and declare for unity. "If I thought," he
said, "that Charles Albert would rise to rare ambition and unite Italy
for his own behoof, I would say Amen." "Let the Moderates," he wrote,
"give us, if they like, a Pope, a single king, a dictator; we can
compromise on everything but federalism." And on these lines he was
working through 1847 to bring the exiles at Paris together on a common
programme of Unity, to which both monarchists and republicans could
rally.
It was in this spirit that in September of the same year he wrote his
famous letter to the Pope. As with the parallel letter to Charles
Albert, he was anxious afterwards to explain away in part its implied
belief in the Pope's patriotism and its anxiety to see him leader of
the Italian movement. But his private letters of the time would seem
to show that this was an afterthought, and that he was sincerer than
he gave himself credit for. In one of them, written apparently just
before the letter to Pius, he says in somewhat Carlylean style, "I
consider this as the last agony of popedom authority. And in my own
way of feeling I would not be sorry to see a great institution dying,
for once, in a noble manner; transmitting the watchword of the future
before vanishing, rather than sinking into the Crockford or Tuileries
mud of the English aristocracy and French monarchy. A moral power,
like a great man, ought always to die so; uttering the words of dying
Goethe, 'let more light in.'" In another letter, written in the same
month, he says that he wrote to the Pope "in a moment of expansiveness
and juvenile illusion," as he would have written to his friend
himself. He was excited and sanguine at the great European drama, that
was developing so fast. He still probably had moments, when the old
faith in men broke through his later suspicion and exclusiveness. He
was ever looking for a new religion to issue forth from Rome,[15] and
for the moment dreamed that a nationalist Pope might be its herald.
His appeal, however, was ludicrous in its miscalculation of the facts.
"Be a believer," he said to Pius, "and unite Italy." He told him that
he, the foremost man of the moment in Europe, had duties of
corresponding magnitude. He could guide Italy to her appointed future,
make of her one great state, based on the people and justice and
religion, with "a government unique in Europe, which would end the
absurd divorce between the spiritual and temporal powers." If
Catholicism were capable of revival, he under God might be the
instrument; if it were destined to give place to a new creed, based on
the same Christian principles, he could be the leader, who would guide
the Church securely through its passage. One can imagine the horror
with which Pius read the part so tactlessly suggested to him; and we
know that the only result of the letter was to thoroughly alarm him.
In fact Mazzini's fits of belief in Pope or King were very transitory.
Only five months before he had written in an open letter, that he "did
not believe that from prince or king or pope Italy would now or ever
find salvation." His mind was in a state of flux, wavering between his
old simple, but for the time impracticable, creed and some compromise
with the new order. It would read him wrongly, if we charged him with
downright insincerity; but his whole conduct through this period is a
disingenuous one, too subordinate to unavowed intentions, too much
akin to that "substitution of Macchiavelli for Dante," which he
condemned so unsparingly in the Moderates. While professedly ready to
work with the monarchical nationalists, while abstaining from any
active republican agitation, he was encouraging republican beliefs,
anxious even to keep something together of a republican organization,
that when "the Moderate farce was hissed off the stage," the
republicans would be again in a position to captain the nationalist
cause and lead it to their own goal. He wants to spread the literature
of Young Italy broadcast. He urges that his followers, while nominally
joining the Moderate ranks and "shouting for Pio Nono louder than the
rest," should quietly prepare to seize the movement for themselves. At
the same time, outside Italy they were to depreciate the Pope with
equal vehemency, that when the inevitable disillusioning in Pius came,
they could put in a claim to foresight. Apart from this underhand
diplomacy, his hesitation was largely justified. He had no security
that the Moderates would accept the offered compromise or declare for
Unity. And he feared that the enthusiasm of the masses might
evaporate in noisy demonstrations, that reform would prove an opiate
to lull the nationalist impulses to sleep again. Towards the end of
1847 his chief anxiety, as Cavour's was for different reasons twelve
years later, was to irritate Austria into taking the offensive, and
force the Italians to fight for independence. He was confident that
she would intervene. Sometimes he hoped that the popular pressure
behind would force Charles Albert to head the national defence; at
other moments he welcomed the thought that the native governments
would decline the challenge, and Young Italy be left alone to lead the
war.
For once he underrated the strength of the nationalist feeling. The
new year opened with revolutions in dramatic sequence. Its first day
saw the Tobacco Riots at Milan,--the overture to the maturing Lombard
rising. Two days later the social revolution mildly reared its head at
Leghorn, and Mazzini's old collaborator, Guerrazzi, was master for a
few days of the insurgent city. In another fortnight Sicily, with one
great effort, threw off the Bourbon yoke; and before the month was
out, the Neapolitans had forced a constitution on King Ferdinand. In
the first half of February Tuscany and Piedmont had their
constitutions too; in a few days more the Second Republic was
proclaimed in France, and the face of European politics was changed.
Pio Nono, ever more fearful of liberalism, but carried helplessly
along, gave the Romans a constitution; and, save in the Austrian
provinces and dependant Duchies, all Italy had won its liberties. War
with Austria was now only a question of weeks, and the nation waited
breathlessly till the signal came from Milan or Turin. Charles Albert
was still the "Wobbling King," drifting towards war, thirsting for
national applause and revenge on Austria, but timorous of the
democratic forces that pushed on behind, dreading republican France as
much as the real enemy across the Ticino.
While he paused, the great uprising came. The news of revolution at
Vienna passed the signal through the North. The heroic Milanese after
five days of memorable struggle drove the great garrison out in
flight. Venice, Bergamo, Brescia, Como, well-nigh every city in the
Lombard and Venetian lands, fought for and won their liberty. The
Austrian power crumbled in a week, and save at Ferrara and the
fortresses of the Quadrilateral,--themselves too all but lost,--no
foot of Italian ground remained to Austria. From all Italy the forces
of the nation were hurrying to complete the work. Piedmont and Tuscany
declared war. The Pope and King of Naples let perforce their troops
march to the front. From town and village, from plain and mountain
valley the volunteers poured up. Princes and statesmen, clergy and
nobles, students and artisans,--all were swept along by the great
flood of patriotism, some lightly or with purpose to betray, but the
mass with the enthusiasm of crusaders, glad, for the day at all
events, to give up comfort and home and life. It seemed as if
Mazzini's vision were fulfilled, and Italy, transfigured by a holy
call, had risen in unconquerable might.
Mazzini hurried to Italy at the glad tidings. He was already in
Paris, where he had gone again directly after the Revolution, and had
just founded a National Association to carry out his policy of
bringing royalist and republican exiles together in the cause of
independence and unity. He crossed the St Gotthard with some danger.
"The scene," he wrote back to England, "was sublime, Godlike. No one
knows what poetry is, who has not found himself there, at the highest
point of the route, on the plateau, surrounded by the peaks of the
Alps in the everlasting silence that speaks of God. There is no
atheism possible on the Alps." He stopped to pick the first pansy he
saw, when he left the snows, to send it to an English friend. He
reached Milan on April 7. He could not go to Piedmont or Genoa, for
the sentence of 1833 still hung over him, and, besides, Milan was the
centre of everything at the moment. But the scene of the Five Days did
not bring the sense of exultation he had expected. "As for Italy," he
writes, "I have grown old, and seem only too much to bear the chains
of exile with me." But he "cried like a child" with enthusiasm, when
he saw two thousand Italians, who had deserted from an Austrian
regiment, march through the shouting crowd; and the reception he found
must soon have cheered him. The very customs-officers on the frontier
had known him from his portraits, and repeated his phrases to him. A
procession met him at the gates of Milan, and took him in triumph to
his hotel. His position was in fact a very strong one. He stood before
his countrymen as the prophet once cast out and stoned, who had
preached in the wilderness, what was now a commonplace on every
tongue. His beliefs of yesterday--utopias to other men--were potent
facts to-day. Italy was free or nearly so. Throughout the land
democracy seemed on the eve of triumph. Even the republicans and
unitarians had shown an unexpected strength. And he, who through long
years had preached and suffered, while others fell away or doubted,
had the grateful homage of his countrymen. At this time, probably, his
word was law at Milan.
It remained to be seen if he had the talent for actual political life,
whether he could put away accumulated prejudices, see clear to the
supreme and indispensable end, and waive all secondary things for
that. His professed position was a sound one. While the war lasted, so
he laid down, there must--apart from the postulate of Unity--be a
truce to party struggles. Monarchy or republic must await the decision
of the liberated and united nation; and meanwhile the whole strength
of the country must be given to the war. His earlier actions were true
to this programme. He supported the Provisional Government, and
discouraged the extremer republicans. Probably, as he hinted later, he
was half inclined at first to believe that Charles Albert was the
fittest instrument for the deliverance of Italy. And though he soon
abandoned any hope in the King, he repeated to the end that, while the
war lasted, there should be no republican agitation.
So far as the war itself was concerned, he did his best in the one way
open to him, the encouragement of the volunteers. He exaggerated their
military value, just as he had always exaggerated the possibilities
of guerilla fighting in Italy. But his advice that every available man
should be thrown on the enemy's communications in Venetia was better
strategy and patriotism than the poor jealousies, that made the
regular army and the politicians depreciate the volunteers from fear
lest their influence should be cast for a republic. In a fight, where
the Italians had no single commander of genius, the Moderates had the
folly to reject the services of men, like Garibaldi and Fanti, who
twelve years later were the first generals in Italy. But, sincerely as
Mazzini tried to help the war, he was not equally loyal to his
professions of political neutrality. His refusal to let unity remain
an open question deprived them at once of any seriousness. Even his
ostensible attitude towards the monarchy was no doubt in part a matter
more of necessity than principle. He seems to have gone to Milan
undecided what exact policy to adopt; and as soon as he arrived there,
he wrote that he was occupied in organizing the republicans, and that,
should Charles Albert fail to gain a speedy and brilliant victory, he
had hopes of success for them. But he soon realized that a republican
agitation meant, if not civil war, at all events a fierce dissension
in the face of the enemy, a dissension on no point of vital principle
or honour,--which would have shamed its author. And, though the
republicans were strong at Milan, they were perhaps a minority even
there, and in the rest of Lombardy a handful, while Piedmont and its
army stood solid in their loyalty to the King. And so, whether from
choice or from necessity, he stood in the letter by his promise to
abstain from republican agitation. But the policy of neutrality sat
uneasily on him, and he soon broke from the spirit of his undertaking
by loud professions of republican faith and suggestions quite
inconsistent with the silence he was pledged to.
To some extent the policy of the Provisional Government excused his
change of attitude. At the beginning of the war everybody had accepted
the position, that there should be a truce to politics till the
fighting was over. But as the war dragged on, the position became a
hardly possible one. The government of Lombardy was hopelessly
incapable, and everybody wished to see it superseded. The
conservatives both at Milan and Turin feared to leave an opening for a
possible Lombard republic after the war. Many of the democrats wished
for annexation as a step to Unity. The agitation for "fusion" with
Piedmont grew so strong, that the government, not unwillingly,
capitulated, and ordered a plebiscite to be taken on the question
whether fusion should take place at once. When the voting came, there
was no doubt abundance of intimidation by the fusionists; but the
overwhelming majority that declared for them proved that the desire
for a North Italian Kingdom was predominant in the politics of the
moment.
Almost irresistible as the forces were that made for fusion, Mazzini
was strictly accurate in branding it as a breach of faith. The
fusionists had tried to win him over. The King had sent a message,
that, if he would use his influence with the republicans in favour of
fusion, he should have an interview with himself, and exercise as much
influence as he wished in drafting the constitution on democratic
lines.[16] The offer was a generous and patriotic one, but Mazzini
consented only on condition that the King would publicly declare for
Unity, and sign a bombastic promise to be "the priest-king of the new
age." Naturally no answer came to this, and Mazzini broke into
polemics, that the bad faith of the other side did something to
excuse, but which were none the less opposed to the spirit of his
pledge. Italy, he said, would never be united, till the flag of the
republic flew at Rome. He pleaded that France should adopt a frankly
"republican and revolutionary" diplomacy. Royalty was "a hereditary
lie," and the republic the only government which would put the best
citizens in power. Now and again he shot stinging phrases at his
opponents, that only added to the bitterness of faction; for, as
often, even when Mazzini tried to be tolerant, his pen ran away with
him. He attacked the Turin nobles, forgetting that they and their sons
were at the war, giving their lives for the cause he loved. No doubt
he had provocation, and the baser Moderates were even more intolerant,
but none the less he was playing a hurtful and ungenerous part.
He made, in fact, a grave blunder in staying at Milan. His presence
there did little to help the war; it was, whether he wished it or not,
a standing encouragement to the factiousness, that was not a little
responsible for the ill-fortune of the army. His place was at Rome. At
bottom the Italians were defeated through the feebleness of Charles
Albert's generalship and policy and the defection of the Pope and
King of Naples. Mazzini could do nothing to make a capable commander
of the King; but he might have influenced his policy. Charles Albert,
timid and conventional as he was, had had his hand forced already and
was prepared to have it forced again, as his son's was a few years
later. Mazzini judged the King accurately and not unkindly; but his
attitude towards him was lacking in all tact. Bad-tempered attacks on
the monarchy, melodramatic appeals for a "priest-king," suggestions
that the united nation would proclaim the republic from the Capitol,
could only alarm. But had the popular pressure been sufficient and
well-directed, Charles Albert would, half fearfully but half gladly,
have felt his way to the crown of Italy. He had a deep belief in
nationality; he dearly loved popular applause. Romagna was only
waiting for his signal to come over to him. Piedmontese agents were at
work in Tuscany, and it is hard to believe that he had not approved
their mission. He hesitated long before he declined for his son the
crown that Sicily laid at his feet. Had Mazzini gone to Rome, he would
have given a great impulse to the radicals and unitarians there. It
would almost certainly have decided the Romagnuols; it would not
impossibly have created such a force of opinion in all Central Italy,
as would have overborne the autonomist parties and the King's own
hesitations, and put all the Papal States and Tuscany under his
suzerainty. Nay more, though the counter-revolution had triumphed at
Naples, the nationalist elements were strong throughout the South; and
had Mazzini organized them from Rome, and Garibaldi marched South in
the name of Unity and Charles Albert, the work of 1860 might have been
done twelve years earlier. Even had the bigger consummation failed,
Mazzini could have forced the Pope to choose between a nationalist
policy and deposition from his temporal throne; he would have thrown
all the energies of the Roman government into the war, and given
Charles Albert another ten or twenty thousand men, enough to shift the
scales of victory.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] See below, p. 127.
[16] According to Madame Venturi (English Edition of Mazzini, V. 96)
the King offered him the premiership; but neither Mazzini himself,
nor, so far as I know, any of the memoirs of the time mention it. For
other overtures from the government see Donaver in _Rassegna
Nazionale_, Dec. 1, 1898.